Silence : a literary history

Silence: A Literary History traces silences in English literature across twelve centuries. Ranging in its inquiry from Old English poems of exile to a 2024 poetry collection about the Covid-19 lockdowns, it identifies and characterises formal and thematic silences, and traces their cultural, philosophical and religious lineages. Emerging themes include the silences associated with the divine, silences experienced in the natural world, silences produced by strong emotions such as love and grief, and the silencings of marginalised voices. Techniques of describing or creating silences range from the descriptive to the structural, from the rhetorical to the graphic. Fourteen chapters and four focus chapters—on Margaret Cavendish’s ‘Of Silence’ and The Lady Contemplation, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Henry James’s The Golden Bowl and Jay Bernard’s Surge—chart an alternative literary history of what is not said.